In a rare moment of sanity, the U.S. Government has agreed that, yes, you can fix your own electronics even if the manufacturer has slapped DRM on the firmware to prevent it. It would be interesting to see the rationale that the manufacturers used in support of the original policy but even the iron constitution of the Irreal operatives is probably not strong enough to prevent collapsing on the floor in a fit of laughter so I’ll forego checking.
All of this originally came to the fore when farmers started complaining loudly that they couldn’t repair their tractors because the makers had slapped DRM on them. They apparently made enough noise to put an end to that but the ban remained on other devices. Now, at last, good sense has prevailed and we can fix our own property even if the manufacturers would rather we pay them to do it.
We have the music and movies industries to thank for this mess. They lobbied long and hard for the DMCA in the naive hope that it would protect their content. Other industries greedily took advantage of the law by installing DRM on their devices in such a way that only they could legally repair them or, in the case of printer and coffee machine makers for example, that you couldn’t use third party consumables like ink cartridges or coffee pods.
The third party consumables situation probably remains the same but it, too, needs to be changed. Or, you can do what we here at Irreal do and refuse to by from the sleazy manufacturers who do this.